Chairperson’s Corner
By Christopher Siudzinski
NewsDirect, April 2024
Welcome! The Marketing and Distribution (MaD) section of the SOA would like to welcome its newest and its longest standing members and all those in between to a new year. Thank you for being a member in 2024!
Our section is here for actuaries in customer-centric, business development, and other non-traditional roles often working alongside their marketing and distribution colleagues. Or they might be someday! Our membership comes from a broad spectrum of organizations, and it continues to grow.
We wanted to hear more from you, so we kicked off the year with a welcome call to our members, inviting them all to an hour long Zoom meeting. We introduced ourselves and the role of the council and discussed past MaD themes and member-driven content focused on evolving channels and digital products. It was a terrific way to meet new members and receive guidance and input on future themes and topics that can help our membership.
Last year we embraced presenting on topics such as minimum viable products, simplifying the insurance purchasing process, and building partnerships in the InsurTech ecosystem. We refreshed with a webcast primer on distribution channels and went deeper to discuss ways to evaluate these channels.
MaD continues to offer the Competiscan report services to our members as an exclusive members-only benefit. Competiscan reports provide samples of insurance product marketing used by insurers and agents to communicate to their customers about product offerings, enrollment opportunities, and other important information. These quarterly reports summarize key marketing activities and trends by various product lines spanning life and health. During our welcome call we provided a walkthrough explaining how best to access these reports, and in this newsletter, we offer additional references and instructions.
We ended our welcome call with a survey to the participants to determine what topics and themes resonate the most for the year ahead. We landed not too surprisingly on actuarial work for marketing and distribution, and product development for alternative distribution channels. These themes will inform future newsletter articles, webcasts, podcasts and even session topics at various SOA events that we will choose to foster in 2024.
If you or anyone you work with would like to develop content for MaD members, please do not hesitate to reach out. The expertise-base of the MaD membership is expansive, and we encourage you to think of the MaD section as a platform to share specialized product marketing and distribution knowledge with the broader actuarial community. Content sharing is an excellent way to participate within the SOA community and to continue to learn from and meet other actuaries in similar roles as your own.
We can always find a place for the voice of our members and are happy to discuss with you how to develop an idea you would like to share or ways to summarize your knowledge and expertise to make it more available to our membership.
Also, our monthly council meetings are open to any MaD member who decides to become a “Friend” to the council. If you have an interest in attending, please let us know by emailing sections@soa.org.
We are always looking to hear from our members. Don’t hesitate to reach out and connect!
Christopher Siudzinski (chair), Erika Dochney (vice-chair), Michelle Young (secretary), Patrick OuYang (treasurer), Tiana Zhao (Marketing Coordinator), Helen Duzhou (Newsletter Editor), Aneesha Deshpande, Art Lewis, and Jim Lucas.
Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries, the newsletter editors, or the respective authors’ employers.
Chris Siudzinski, FSA, MAAA, is the lead consultant and founder for INSKI Consultants. He can be reached at chris@inski.tech.